“... people – what they are like as sources of testimony, whether and in what circumstances they may be trusted.’ Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a ...”

“... take it, is that if practical, adaptative emotions are replaced by others, we do not simply, as it may seem, withdraw from the world. We change it, or it changes with us. I don’t know how far we can go with Musil down this road, or how far he himself, ever the target of his own irony, believed we could go. But the mode of thinking shown here, what Musil ...”

“... It may well be that the most interesting literature of this century cannot be subsumed under the broad label of Modernism or be said to have originated in the great literary centres, but was actually the work of outsiders and mavericks, starting with Kafka, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions ...”

“... win the next election, had by April swung to a 56-23 majority prophesying a Labour victory. In the May local elections the Tories won just 505 seats to Labour’s 1721, leaving Labour in control of 31 out of 33 metropolitan districts. Thatcher was on the ropes and it was entirely her own fault. At which point the Treasury (Major, Lamont) and the Foreign Office ...”

“... view that the best government is the least government. Whatever else initiatives like these may achieve, each has the virtue of allowing individuals to pursue welfare as they see fit: risky retirement investments or safe ones, open classrooms or highly structured ones etc. On this view, the real virtue of the competitive free market is not so much what ...”

“... capital of Dhi Qar, when shells explode inside the compound. He endures four days under attack in May, penned into the compound as Italian soldiers and private security contractors fight desperately against a barrage of shelling and gunfire. They are eventually saved by the arrival of a single airplane gunship that dissolves the insurgency in a matter of ...”

“... regarded as detritus. Dispersal has cut them off not only from the past, but from the future. They may have some way to go, as detritus, but since the island doesn’t boast a recycling plant, they will remain for the duration what they already are. They constitute the stuff of death rather than the stuff of life. Narrative keeps fresh the capacity for memory ...”

“... came under fire from foreign historians. The most effective blow was dealt by the American Robert Paxton, whose Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1972) demolished the belief that the Vichy regime was an aberration. Vichy’s policies, Paxton argued, not least the deportation of more than seventy thousand Jews to Nazi extermination camps, were not ...”

“... distract him from his misery. The chronology at the back of the book records such key events as (May 1935) ‘HR beaten up visiting dockworkers; burns MSS’ and (October 1946) ‘Burns MSS; murders puppy’. He was born in 1906 in Tysmenitz: now in Ukraine, it was a Polish town until 1772 when it was absorbed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth’s ...”

“... what is happening this moment, now; who manipulate the dread of a terrible future (and the future may always be terrible) to dull the sounds of freedom. Rosa Luxemburg was not one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been held because of her opposition to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to ...”

“... under any other act, then the coroner must hold an inquest as soon as it is practicable. A jury may or may not be summoned, but either way the inquest must decide, first, who the deceased was; and second, how, when and where they came by their death. In the past, inquests used to engage with far wider questions, often ...”

“... and on the royal favourite Buckingham. There is only one article on a country other than England: Robert Harding’s ‘Aristocrats and Lawyers in French Provincial Government, 1559-1648’. William J. Bouwsma writes on ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’. His most interesting point is that the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ entered ...”

“... Gay has indicated what the nature of the material still being withheld is likely to be, and how it may affect his own conclusions. (Thus one may infer from the evidence hinted at that Freud’s own sex life, which, it had seemed, came to an end when he was not quite 44 years of age, ...”

“... patients who could sue but who do not, than the numbers who actually do take legal action.’ He may well be right: he is certainly right to suggest that most people in this situation want not revenge or money but a truthful account of what has gone wrong and what is being done to put it right. Litigation is often the resort of the terminally frustrated. But ...”

“... headgear for ladies known as ‘tires’ or ‘attires’ – and the first contact between them may have been in the ambit of theatrical costuming. By 1604, certainly, Shakespeare was lodging with the Mountjoys (Christopher and his French wife, Marie), and in that year assisted in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of ...”